Saturday, June 8, 2013

Mini Giardino

Last year, at the end of summer I decided I wanted a veggie garden and convinced Lorenzo's parents to let me dig up a one and a half by two metre patch of their back yard, boarder it with old scrap wood and sow some seed- pretending all along I knew what I was doing. I had a great excuse in the beginning... That as it was late in the growing season I wasn't really trying to grow anything to eat, just to "prepare the soil" for the next season. Weeeelllll that excuse was tested because nothing grew (only because it was at the end of summer and you know, cold weather, not much sunshine and all that) but this season I have no excuse.
To date, in my 1.5 by 2m patch I have 4 tomato bushes, 4 strawberries, 3 cucumber "vines", a chilli bush, a snow pea vine and a leaf pretending to be a parsley plant... yes, I am capitalising on my space. Well somehow these darling plants understood that I was short for space, and have made themselves minitures... My snow pea vine (if you can call it that) is a pushing on 20 cm high.... and already has a lovely snowpea and a couple of flowers. My chilli bush, at a hight of maybe 25cms, is covered in flowers and baby chillis, the cucumbers are shooting out flowers from where I assume the vine is meant to grow (at the moment the plants are smaller than the chilli) the tomatoes are probably the biggest space killers, but they two are covered in flowers and I even have 2 lovely tomatoes coming along... The strawberries had their day... clearly strawberry season is over..........

My pride and joy however (and my saviour- proving that I really do go to Ag college) is my Rose. Do you remember the beautiful orange rose that Lorenzo's dad gave me for easter? Well before it wilted and died I decided to try my luck at growing a rose cutting, I thought I had failed miserably when the few leaves I had left on the cutting died and fell off, but I saw that the stem was still green (and as I learnt in Biology- this means that it has the power to photosynthesize) so I left it and kept watering it. After a good couple of months, the leaves have now shoot and my rose is well on it's way! Hooray!